


On Living

by KrystinaSky



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Family Feels, Muggles, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Post-Hogwarts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-11
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-01-31 18:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12687597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KrystinaSky/pseuds/KrystinaSky
Summary: The war is over. What now?Immediately after the Battle of Hogwarts Harry finds his place in the world with a little help from his infant godson.Continued! Added chapters will follow different characters immediately following the war. Chapter 2 - Draco Malfoy is released from Azkaban.





	1. Harry Potter and the Godson

Harry had nowhere to go.

It was a very strange sort of feeling after the last year, even the last few years.

Hermione had gone to Australia to find her parents, and Ron and Ginny had gone back to the Burrow where, Harry was certain, the Weasley’s were grieving together.

They had of course invited him to come home with them, but Harry couldn't imagine joining them in their grief. He felt too relieved to grieve properly.

The students and most of the staff had all dispersed too, and no one seemed likely to tell Harry what to do next.

So Harry lingered at Hogwarts with the ghosts.

He slept in his old bed, alone, and spent his evenings in the empty common room, with only Nearly Headless Nick as occasional company. During the day he sometimes helped the small handful of witches and wizards who worked on restoring the school grounds. The trouble was, there was a rotation of them and it seemed whenever one batch got used to him, another would come along and he’d be back to avoiding awed stares, whispers and awkward questions.

On her last day, one of them asked him before she left, “When are you heading home?”

Harry stared at her. Then he looked around the rubble-strewn front hall. He didn’t know how to answer her.

He was home.

Even if home was bloodstained now, and ghostly faces peered at him from the trees at the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Even if home was too large and echoed hollowly with mingled, friendly laughter and dying screams.

It was three weeks from Voldemort’s defeat when an owl arrived for him. It was a screech owl, all business like, bearing a lime green envelope. The note inside was from a department of the ministry he’d never heard of - the Magical Child Welfare Office, which seemed, from the designation written on the front of the envelope, to be based out of St. Mungo’s.

The letter inside read:

 

_Dear Mister H. Potter,_

_We are writing to you regarding the custody of Theodore Remus Lupin. As specified by his late parents’ will, upon their decease, Theodore Remus Lupin has been placed in the care of his Grandmother, Mrs. Andromeda Tonks. However, Mrs. Tonks has recently become indisposed and is in convalescence at St. Mungos. Mrs. Tonks may be unable to care for her grandson for an extended period of time. We are contacting you as next in line to receive custody._

_Please let us know at your earliest convenience if you are willing and able to take charge of Theodore Remus Lupin. Rest assured, if you are not able, the child will be placed at a ministry-approved care facility._

 

_Best regards,_

_Felicity Dooringer_

_Magical Child Welfare Office._

 

_______________________

 

Harry arrived at St. Mungo's a short two hours later. He hadn’t been sure how he was supposed to get there, and in the end he’d flown away from school grounds to Hogsmeade, and apparated a few times until he was in an alley beside the dilapidated storefront that served as the hospital’s entrance.

Once inside, he had no idea where to go. He looked around and made his way to a round desk labeled “Information”.

“Excuse me,” he said. His voice croaked a little. It had been almost two days since he’d actually spoken to anyone.

The young, harried looking woman sitting behind the desk looked up at him sharply, and then  froze.

Harry realized suddenly that walking in the front door might not have been such a good idea. There was a slow hush falling over the whole crowded room, marked by the occasional whisper of ‘Harry Potter”.

“Y-yes,” the woman said, eyes flickering to his scar, “How-how can I help you, Mister Potter?”

“Um,” he shifted awkwardly, digging in his jeans pocket for the letter to show her, keenly aware that he also had not brushed his hair or shaved his very scant facial hair in days either. “I received this, I was hoping to talk to someone…”

She blinked dazedly at the note, “Oh, the Magical Child Welfare Office. Right. Would you - please - just wait here a moment mister Potter, um, sir?”

“Yeah, yeah of course,” Harry said quickly.

She started to walk away, then turned back around quickly, extending her hand and, Harry thought, holding her breath as she said, very quickly, “Thank you, so much sir.”

Harry stared at her hand for a moment, confused.

The room swelled with applause. All Harry could think was that he was wearing the same jeans he’s been hauling around the country for months, and his faded hoodie had a long-broken zipper.

He did not meet the receptionists eyes when he shook her hand. He thought he might’ve muttered something like, “don’t mention it.” He sort of nodded awkwardly at the now-standing, wet-eyed crowd in the waiting room. Harry slumped into a vacant seat, feeling the eyes of the room following him. The old man sitting next to him shifted awkwardly.

“My daughter's at Hogwarts,” he blurted out, “third year.”  
“Oh,” Harry said, “Is she, um, alright?”

“Yeah, yeah. In for counseling. They’re offering it for all the kids, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Harry said, “Sounds good though.”

“Yeah… it’s all thanks to you,” the man said quickly, glancing at Harry out of the corner of his eye, “that she’s okay, I mean. That we’re all okay, I suppose. You really… I just... “ he looked in the opposite direction, and Harry noticed he was clutching his hands together so tight the knuckles were white.

“You’re seventeen, yes?” he asked, and Harry was startled by the sudden shift in the conversation.

“That’s right.”

“That’’s… really young.” He met Harry’s eyes again. His were red-rimmed, his face sort of gaunt. Harry wondered, suddenly, if his third-year daughter looked like him. If he’d passed her in the hallway at some point and not noticed.

“Are you alright?” the man asked, softly.

It was the first time anyone had asked him that, and Harry realized he didn’t know. “I, um, I’m alive,” he said.

Just then, the receptionist called his name and Harry nodded at the man next to him and hurried to follow her.

She led him down a series of halls until the hospital rooms turned to cramped offices. They stopped in front of one, and the receptionist announced him softly.

A slender woman with a riot of auburn hair piled on top of her head looked up, her thick glasses a little askew.

“Hello!” she said, quickly, “Harry Potter, I wasn’t expecting you so quick.” She motioned him in, sitting him down in a lightly padded chair across from her.

“I’ve got tea coming.”

“Oh… that’s alright.”

“Well I’d like some. I told them I had Harry Potter coming and they were willing to do anything. That’s a novelty around here lately. We’ve been very busy.”

Harry hadn’t thought about it, but now he wondered how many other children were without parents now.

“What happens,” he asked, “to the children who lost their parents?”

“Many of them go to family members. We have group homes too, for the ones who don’t have families.”

Her eyes softened, looking at him, “If you’re wondering, this office didn't have anything to do with placing you. Dumbledore did that all on his own, I understand.”

“Right. He had his reasons.”

“I’m sure. So, regarding your godson.”

Harry straightened a little. It was the first time anyone but Remus Lupin had called Teddy his anything.  It felt strange. Not bad strange though. It felt like something important that was his to see to. He hadn’t had that in weeks.

“His grandmother seems to have suffered a serious heart attack. The healers tell me it was triggered by the stress of losing her daughter. She needs to be on bedrest for a while.”

Harry deflated a little, embarrassed. He had hardly thought about Andromeda Tonks.  “Is she going to be alright?”

“Eventually, hopefully, but right now she’s in no state to take care of a baby. Won’t be for a while, they’re saying. You’re next in line, as the godfather. Obviously, considering your age and, um, circumstances, we don’t expect you to--”

“I can though,” Harry cut her off, urgently, “If someone can just show me a few things, I can take care of him.”

The child welfare woman looked surprised. “You... want custody?” she asked.

Harry nodded eagerly. He hadn't even realized he wanted it so much until this moment. “Yes,” he said, determined.

“Well,” she shuffled papers on her desk, “You do have the right… babies are tricky though, you know that, don’t you?”

“I figured,” Harry said, “But if someone could just show me the basics I think I could manage. I'd like to. Really.”

She looked down, “Well then. If you’re sure.”

A healer retrieved Harry from the Magical Child Welfare office when he was finished signing documents. This healer was a little less awe-struck by Harry, although Harry suspected that had more to do with his apparent exhaustion than anything else.

The healer led him two floors up to a room full of babies in cots. There were a few with adults clustered around them.

Harry felt strange, looking at them all. He hadn’t been around babies much in his life, and he thought they seemed almost alarmingly small, and very much like they should all be surrounded by grown-ups. By people who could take care of them. For some reason he thought about Hagrid carrying him just weeks before. There was an emotion, just out of reach, that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

“He’s just here,” the healer said, guiding Harry to a blue cot in a corner of the room. Harry leaned over, peering inside

There was not a baby inside. Instead there was small, fluffy purple puppy.

“Um,” said Harry, staring.

“Oh, did nobody tell you? He’s an odd one. Apparently, his dad was a werewolf-”

“I knew that,” Harry bit out, annoyed.

“Well, his mum was something else a bit odd-”

“A Metamorphmagus,” Harry snapped.

“Right. Anyway, he turned out like this.”

“A… puppy?”

“A natural-born animorphmagus,” the healer corrected, “he seems to change randomly.”

With an obliging pop the puppy turned into a tiny, purple-haired baby who began to cry.

“Ah, there he goes,” the healer said.

_______________________________

 

The harried healer showed Harry how to hold Teddy (“support his neck, that’s the most important bit”) and how to get him to burp, which Harry had never realized tiny humans needed help doing. He thought privately that it was kind of disgusting. Surely baby animals didn’t need so much help with their natural bodily functions. They showed him how to feed the baby and gave him a paper that listed places to buy things like nappies and milk for Teddy to drink. It was so much information, and Teddy was so small and so _loud_ that for a moment Harry wondered if he had not thought through taking Teddy home well enough.

Nevertheless, that evening Harry found himself back in the abandoned Gryffindor common room with a crying baby in one arm and an overflowing bag of baby-caring materials in the other.

_____________________________

It was a good thing Harry hadn’t been sleeping through the night anyway, because Teddy certainly didn’t.

Harry did not mind. In fact, it was a nice change, to have something to do rather than lie awake, staring at the ceiling and _not_ hearing the breathing and shifting of Ron, Neville, Seamus and Dean in the room with him.

Instead, Harry was up and cradling Teddy in the moonlit room, pressing bottles and clean nappies on him. Ron’s bed became a changing table, and the piles of nappies, wipes and dirty laundry filled the space that had been so unnaturally empty for the past weeks. Harry did not even particularly mind the smells Teddy exhumed, and wondered if maybe teenage boys were every bit as bad smelling as infants.

Teddy was happiest when he was being held, and eventually, Harry gave up on the cot the hospital had sent him with altogether. Teddy slept next to Harry, in easy reach when he began to fuss at night.

Harry was already a light sleeper. When Teddy was not the cause of his insomnia, Harry liked to lie on his side and look at him. He liked to think he could see bits of Lupin and bits of Tonks in his face, and he thought about the way Sirius would talk about how Harry looked like his parents. He would whisper the same sorts of things to Teddy.  “Your mum would love the color you’ve got your hair on now,” he’d say, or, “Reckon you’ve got your dad’s nose, Teddy.”

The hospital had sent him with a sort of wrap thing as well, and Harry took to wearing Teddy during the day once he figured out how to use it.

His days became a series of feedings and nappy changes, and in between those they could sit in the grass or in a window and with Teddy there it was about more than passing time.

When Teddy chose to be a puppy, he was a little more mobile, and Harry liked to see him scuttle and roll around in the green grass.

He didn’t bother with the repair team anymore, but they encountered each other sometimes anyway. But that was easier with Teddy too, because he was something to talk about other than Voldemort and the war and the bloodstains they couldn’t seem to get out of the flagstones.

_________________________________

 

McGonagall visited a couple weeks after Harry brought Teddy back to Hogwarts. She sat with Harry in Dumbledore’s office, dressed more casually than he’d ever seen her, other than when Sirius had broken into the common room and she’d turned up in her dressing gown in Harry’s third year.

“Call me Minerva,” was one of the first things she said to him when they were seated together in the office. Harry stared at her, not sure if he could manage that.

“Alright,” he said, resuming bouncing Teddy lightly on his knee. McGonagall watched them with the hint of a smile on her lined face.

“The reporters are asking to come here,” she said.

“Oh.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Why’re you asking me”

“You seem to be the only ones living here right now,” she said, strangely gentle, “it seems like the polite thing to do.” 

“Well… do you think they should come here?”

She looked thoughtful, “Well… they’re not all Reeta Skeeter types. There’s one in particular I think you’d like. What if only she came here?”

“What will she want to do?”

“Take pictures, ask the crew some questions. And… if you’re willing, the whole world is waiting to hear from Harry Potter.”

Harry stared at Teddy. Teddy stared back and made a gurgling sound. Harry liked it, the way his eyes fixed on Harry’s face. The way he knew Harry’s face better than anyone else’s.

“I don't know what I’d say,” Harry told her.

____________________________________

 

The reporter was named Sally. She drifted around the castle with a photographer, jotting notes down in a parchment notebook by hand.

Harry greeted them politely, and then stayed out of their way. Sally didn’t press him for an interview or follow him around, but she’d wave a friendly greeting when they crossed paths throughout the day. He didn’t even notice when the photographer snapped a photo of him in the late afternoon.

In the evening Sally found him in the Great Hall eating dinner the house elves had brought him with one hand, while holding Teddy’s bottle in the other.

“Hey,” she said, casually, sitting across from him like it was nothing.

“Hey,”  Harry said “how’d everything go?”

“Good, good, I think we’re mostly going to be publishing photos in the paper. You know, so people can see the recovery taking place.”

“That sounds nice,” Harry said, honestly.

“Yeah… you know there's this one picture we took and I really like it but I want to get your permission to publish it.”

“Oh. Okay.”

It was a nice gesture, Harry thought. Teddy made a chirping sound that made him smile. Sally did too.

“I have a daughter,” she told him, “she’s two. They’re so cute at this age,” she eyed Teddy fondly and Harry decided that he liked her. She retrieved the photo from the depths of her robes and showed it to him, distracting Teddy with funny faces as he took it from her and considered it.

The photo was of he and Teddy a few hours earlier. They were sitting together in the sill of a large window that faced the lake and the forest. Teddy was propped against Harry’s knees, facing him. Harry stared at it. They were both so still in the picture it almost looked like a muggle photograph, but Harry thought he had never liked a picture of himself so much. He liked the way his face looked looking at Teddy, even unshaven and topped with very messy, too-long hair. And he liked most of all the way Teddy’s tiny fist was curled around his finger.

“What do you think?” Sally asked him.

“It’s good,” he said, “Yeah, you can use this one.”

_______________________________________

 

He regretted his decision a little the next day when the photo appeared on the front cover of the Daily Prophet. It took up nearly the whole page, and the headline under it read “The Ones Who Keep Living”

That afternoon the letters started coming in, since the entire wizarding world now knew where Harry was. Harry did not open any of them, except one from Ron. Ron wrote that his whole family wanted Harry to come to the Burrow, that his mother wanted to see Teddy, and wasn’t the castle empty? What was he doing there anyway? Did he spend all day just staring out of windows like in that picture?

Harry looked around the empty Great Hall and felt a little silly, but not in a bad way. In a _normal_ way.

He packed up all of Teddy’s things and his few things and left the castle. He glanced back at it when he’d gone a little ways down the road. There was a light sparkle of spell casting from the repair team over one of the parapets, but other than that, from where he was standing, the castle did not look like it had been torn apart by war. It looked like it always had, like itself. Someday, Harry though, they would get the bloodstains out of the floors.

He continued on his way to Hogsmeade with Teddy strapped to his front. He took Teddy into the Three Broomsticks, where Madame Rosmerta cooed over them while Harry ate a quick dinner. She didn’t let him pay. In fact, she told him emphatically he would never pay for anything at her pub ever again. Harry signaled the Night Bus from the main street. Stan was shocked to see him, and Harry took advantage of his awe to demand that they drive carefully, for Teddy’s sake. He regretted it a little. They _crept_ across the country, and it was very late at night when Harry arrived at the Burrow.

____________________________________________

 

Everything in the Burrow felt smaller. Except Ginny. Ginny alone seemed to have grown to fit Harry’s memories of her. Everything in the Borrow seemed a little duller, a little drained of it’s old sparkle and color. Except Ginny. Ginny was _blinding_.

Walking into a room and seeing Ginny in it made Harry’s head spin a little. It had been like a dream for so long, and now the realness of her actually being there was startling.

He hardly knew what to do.

Ginny liked Teddy a lot. She’d hold him and make faces at him whenever Harry had to do something without him. Every time Harry saw them together, he felt something very large welling up in his chest. Something that seemed too large and grown-up for the Burrow.

“You have a future now,” Hermione wrote to him one day in a letter, “You’ve got to decide what you’re going to do with it.” It reminded him of something the charmed planners she’d given he and Ron in their fifth year would’ve said.

Harry thought Ron’s letter from Hermione might’ve said something similar (although not too similar, because Ron’s ears had turned red when he’d read it) because he asked him after dinner, “Reckon you still want to be an Auror?”

Harry hadn’t really thought about it. He couldn’t really picture anything else though so he nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

“Me too,” Ron said, “Figure we’ve got a lot of practice now, might as well make a living for it, right?”

“Right,” Harry said. Ginny was sitting on the rug, Teddy lying in front of her on his back. She was doing something silly with his flailing feet that made him giggle. _Living for it_ , he thought.

  
  
  
  
  
  



	2. Draco Malfoy and Muggles

The day Draco Malfoy was released from prison the sun was shining. He had only spent a total of eleven days locked away, but his parents - and especially his father - would likely be there far longer.

There was no one waiting for him on the outside. He stood on the rocky ground in front of the prison gates and blinked out at the too bright sun and miles and miles of water between himself and any form of civilization. He did not have money, a broomstick, or even a wand.

The prison guards - surly replacements of the former dementors - sneered at him from their towers, fingering their own wands as if enjoying his predicament. His escort took him roughly by the arm and side-alonged them away. A moment later he found himself on a rocky, abandoned beach. His escort looked at him, coldly. “Good luck, Death Eater,” he said, and was gone.

Draco could see only two options. He could stand there on the beach and shout across the water to be let back into prison, or he could walk. He hated prison. He hated how the disgraced Death Eaters shrieked at each other. He hated the way they talked about dead students most of all. He saw those faces every time he closed his eyes, backlit by fire and Harry Potter of all people reaching for him through the smoke and the blood dripping from Granger’s arm onto the floor where he’d played with toy broomsticks as a child.

So he walked.

He walked for hours, eventually discovering a somewhat paved muggle road that he followed, hoping it would lead to somewhere. The road stayed empty and the sun stayed bright over his head, and beneath his ripped jacked that smelled of smoke and castle dust, sweat beaded uncomfortably, chilling the exposed skin of his neck. But as the day wore on the sun was starting to sink and his legs were aching, a chill breeze picking up strength.

An old bus with peeling paint pulled up beside him. The muggle in the driver’s seat eyed him curiously from the open window.

“You're not going to make it to the bus stop afore I get there,” he said, “and you know, I can’t wait ‘round for nobody.”

Draco tried to glare. He wasn’t sure if he was successful. He was so _tired._

“Alright then” the man said grudgingly after a moment, “Get on already.”

Draco climbed onto the bus, eyeing the rickety floor and patched seats suspiciously. There were only two other people on the small bus. They were clearly muggles, and they looked at Draco strangely. He had not seen a mirror for some time and their gazes unnerved him. Unconsciously he pulled at the sleeve of his jacket beneath which the Dark Mark lurked.

When he woke up the sky outside was dark. The bus was empty but for the driver, who had turned around in his seat and was looking at Draco.

“This is the last stop,” he said.

“I know,” Draco croaked, even though he hadn’t known. He stood up. He was lightheaded, and it occurred to him he had not eaten or even had a drink all day. He caught himself on the back of the seat in front of him.

The driver signed, “‘nother bloody runaway,” he muttered, “you kids.” He stood up and took Draco by the arm. Draco reeled back, sneering instinctually.

“Oy!” the muggle said, hanging on doggedly, “listen here. I got a wife and two little ones. This isn’t no funny business, aright? Just come on home with me and we’ll get you supper and a bed and then yer off in the morning to wherever it is you think your going.”

“I can’t go with you,” Draco said, aghast, “You’re a mu-- stranger!”

“You’re in a world full of strangers, lad, if you choose to see ‘em all that way. Come on now, this here is a small village, there aren’t any homeless shelters and the pub keeper’s on holiday so you can’t get a room there. It’s me or the streets tonight.”

The night outside was inky, and the breeze was a proper little wind by now, rattling against the unsealed windows of the bus.

“Fine,” Draco said.

  
  


The bus driver lived in a small house. Far too small, in Draco’s opinion, for the bus driver himself, a wide-girthed woman and the two very active young girls who lived there.

The girls laughed at Draco’s name as they sat around a worn table, the entire family having left the television in the other room to watch him and the bus driver eat re-heated leftovers.

“Tell the truth now,” the bus driver said, pointing at him with a hunk of bread, “that’s a name you gave yourself, as you rebellious young folk do sometimes, right?”

Draco spluttered. He opened his mouth to tell them about the nobility of astrological names in his family, but then he stopped, overcome by a wave of exhaustion. He didn’t feel noble, and he didn’t want to talk about his family.

The bus driver didn’t push him for a response.

They did not have a spare bedroom, but the bus driver’ wife put pink-striped sheets and a threadbare quilt on the sofa in the cluttered living room. She left a glass of water on the little table beside the couch for him thoughtlessly, and Draco realized as he settled down, watching them through half-closed eyes, she did the same for the two little girls.

Eventually their bedroom doors were closed, the lights all turned out, and he laid in the dark, listening to the house creak and the foreign clutter loom around him strangely. He didn't think he would sleep at first. The sofa had a spring coming loose that poked at him. But the house was so unlike prison, and he slept deeply until dawn began to streak in through the windows. As he woke, blinking up at a water stain on the ceiling, he heard voices in the kitchen.

“Reckon he’s seen some bad things, that boy,” a hushed voice murmured, “he has that look don’t he? Seen too much. Reminds me of them boys come back from the war.”

Draco kept his eyes closed, pretending to still be asleep. He didn’t know much about Muggle wars. He’d heard they were vicious, that the weapons they’de invented in lieu of magic made gruesome messes out of people. But then he’d stepped over Lavender Brown and she--

He rolled over, burying his face into the musty back of the sofa. There was a strange, distant ringing in his ears.

“And he didn’t say anything about who he is or where he’s headed to?” the wife asked.

“Not a thing. Not a thing on him either. Can’t imagine he’ll get far, couldn’t even pay for the bus trip yesterday.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Dunno.”

  
  


Despite his promises of the day before, the bus driver, who it turned out was called Roland, did not kick Draco out that day. In fact, he acted as if it had already been decided that Draco was staying for the time being, and took him along on his afternoon bus route, meandering down country roads between empty green hills and the occasional clusters of stone buildings and sheep.

Roland didn’t ask any questions. He would occasionally point out some landmark or another to Draco, but otherwise seemed perfectly willing to sit quietly, humming along to his scratchy radio and conversing with passengers as they came and went.

Five days passed like this. Roland and his family let Draco be quiet, carrying on with their usual activities around him. When the girls tried to ask him questions their mother cut them off with warning looks.

Draco knew he should _feel_ things about this arrangement. Embarrassment, maybe, that he was essentially a charity case in the home of working-class muggles. But he felt strangely out of feelings. He was too tired for them, and it was so much easier to stare at the water stain on the ceiling at night, and the way the road curved through the rolling hills ahead of the bus during the day.

On the sixth day since Draco’s arrival, it was Roland’s day off and he disappeared for a few hours in the early afternoon, returning rosy cheeked. He took Draco out into the garden behind the house and began working away at the weeds. Draco didn’t know the first thing about gardens or weeding. He stood just outside the turned dirt, watching Roland curiously.

“Come on now,” Roland said to him.

Draco frowned, “I don’t know how.”

“You just pull up the ones that shouldn't be here,” Roland said.

Draco squatted beside him gingerly. He was wearing an old pair of Roland’s trousers but even so he didn’t like the thought of getting actual dirt on them.

“Like this one?” he asked, pointing.

“No, lad!” Roland said, lightly slapping his hand away from the leafy foliage, “that’s a turnip!” he pointed at what seemed to Draco to be an identical cluster of leaves, “do that one!”

Draco pulled it up, wrinkling his nose. It came loose easily, damp earth shaking loose from the cluster of roots. It reminded him of herbology and the way his friends would--

He dropped the weed and sat down heavily, the ringing back in his ears. He was thinking about fire and falling and--

“Hey now,” Roland was saying, squatting in front of Draco, his hands on his arms, “yer alright laddie, breathe now, it’ll pass.”

Draco realized he had his hands over his ears for some reason. He sucked in a gasp of loam-scented air.

“Ya just stay seated right there,” Roland said, settling back on his heels and pulling at a weed beside him.

After a moment, when the only sounds were birds overhead and Draco’s harsh breathing, he sighed, his shoulders dropping. He looked at Roland still just in front of him, picking at weeds calmly.

He was so different from everything Draco had known before, with his scruffy face and clothes, and his noisy bus that clunked slowly through the rural muggle villages around them.

He knew nothing about Draco’s war.

“Reckon you’ll stay?” Roland asked him.

Draco didn’t know how to answer that question. He looked away awkwardly. He kept trying to think about it, about what he would do next, where he would go. But his thoughts always seemed to drift away before he cold arrive at any kind of conclusion, spreading thin across the rolling green hills until they faded like mist in the sun.

“Well,” Roland said after a moment, regarding Draco thoughtfully, “I think you should.”

Draco blinked, “Do you?”

Roland shrugged, “Why not? It’s an alright place here. Good as any, I reckon. And safe. Reckon you could do with a bit of safe, am I right? And you’ve got _us_ here, at least, haven’t you?”

Draco hadn’t know that he did “have” them, or even quite what that meant.

Roland didn’t wait for him to answer. “I went down and talked to Marcus at the pub this afternoon. He needs a hand down there, now that young Ricky’s gone off to the city. He’s got a room above empty too. You know anything about pouring drinks and the like?”

Draco knew next to nothing about pouring drinks, especially muggle ones, and _for_ muggles.

“Not really,” he said.

Roland looked at him and shook his head, askance, “why’d a posh thing like you wind up like this I’ll never know. Anyway, ‘tis simple enough to learn. I can take you down tomorrow to meet Marcus.”

And that was that.

  
  
  


Draco was terrible at his new job. There was absolutely nothing about it he did well. But when he’d dropped a glass on his second day, an elderly customer who was missing a finger had retrieved him from the floor behind the bar where the noise had driven him. He’d said in a soft, rough voice, “breathe through it now.”

It was a small village and word traveled fast. The customers were kind. The old men looked at him with sad, understanding eyes.

One afternoon, after a few drinks, one of them looked at Draco and said, grimly, “yer too young for Desert Storm.”

Draco didn’t know what he meant.

“Too young for any war. Always are though,” he continued, words slurring.

“Quiet, man,’” his friend beside him said, “Let ‘im be.”

Months passed and he got better. He dropped a glass but he stayed on his feet. He rode the bus with Roland when he didn’t have to work, and he talked to customers when he did.

On a Monday when no one was on the bus but them, Roland slowed at a particularly desolate spot in the road. “Huh,” he said, “this is where I found ya six months ago.”

Draco stared at the empty spot by the side of the road. Had it already been six months?

“Looked terrible,” he continued, “like a half-dead scarecrow.”

“Thanks a lot, Roland,” Draco said.

“Tis only true. Acted like one too.”

“Hey now.”

“Should’ve appreciated the quiet, now I know what a snarky little bastard you are.”

Draco lightly kicked the back of Rolands seat, and Roland smiled into the rearview mirror at him.

“Marcus says yer doing better,” he said, lightly.

“If by that he means ‘breaking fewer glasses’ and ‘not handing out _pints_ of whiskey’.....”

“Nah, don’t think that’s what he means at all,” Roland said.

“Ah,” Draco said, “well,” he looked out the window.

“Someday, when yer ready, I hope you tell me about it,” Roland said, “might be good for ya.”

Draco swallowed hard, “I don’t know about that,” he said.

Roland nodded.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
